He ran his hand through his hair and his eyes softened. ‘But I decided you are my business when I thought I’d lost you in the river today.’ He stepped closer until her vision was blocked by his body and she felt the barest touch of his chest against her breasts. A shudder ran through her body and his voice was barely above a whisper. ‘And it became my business after I held you and kissed you today.’
Cate tipped her head back to look at him and typically, when she was too close to Noah, her mind worked sluggishly. It was hard to think when all she wanted to do was lose herself in his arms and recapture the taste of him. Then her mind cleared.
Lose herself! Her half-closed eyes snapped open. This was getting out of her control. She needed to remind herself there was little hope of a future in this relationship. He was going back to Sydney soon. She tried for flippancy. ‘I thought the kissing was mutual. I’d hate you to take all the credit.’
His teeth snapped together. ‘If that’s the case, why were you kissing Dwyer?’
So that’s what all this was about. Men! Her own temper surfaced as the implications set in. Cate stepped back and looked meaningfully towards the window that faced the car park. ‘Doing a spot of peeping Tommery, Noah? Is that what all this is about? Dog in a manger?’
His eyes glittered and she stepped back a fraction. ‘I think we have more than that between us.’ He bit the words out and spun away from her. Cate drew a deep breath at the sudden space around her. She saw him roll his shoulders to ease the tension in his neck and she remembered he’d been in the helicopter, too. She imagined it might almost have been harder to watch than experience—especially if he was beginning to care for her. How did she feel about that? She realised she’d never really thought about how he might be affected by all this.
He turned back to face her and he smiled ruefully at her. Slowly, but with purpose, he leant down and very softly brushed her lips with his.
‘I’m sorry. It’s been a big day for both of us. And I’m rushing you.’
He kissed her again.
Not fair, Cate thought as another shudder ran through her body. She tried to stay rigid and unmoved beneath his insidious onslaught. If he used force she could push him away, slap his face and get out of there. But this was a dare—a challenge to stay unmoved as with the barest whisper his lips paid homage to her mouth and her brow and jaw, and it was the most difficult thing in the world for Cate to fight against.
And Noah knew it.
She could feel his breath against her face and the beginnings of his abrasive bristles rasped across her cheek. His thick, curling lashes rested on his cheeks—lashes that any woman would have given her eye teeth for. They didn’t match his businesslike veneer and gave him a vulnerability that was at odds with what she knew of him. Vulnerability that she found achingly attractive, and it didn’t help to keep her immune from his power. She needed more time.
She could feel herself softening against him and the moment had come to either bail out or admit to him that he could move her more than she wanted him to.
She stepped back.
He opened his eyes and she almost lost herself in their sleepy passion. He stroked her cheek. ‘I never took you to be a coward, Cate.’ The warmth in his eyes caressed her. ‘Admit we have something special going on here.’
Cate panicked. ‘Why? So you can slum it with the country bumpkin?’ She was backed into a corner and she knew it. But she wasn’t going to admit to anything when she wasn’t even sure how she felt. She’d done that with Brett. She wouldn’t let herself be seduced into a relationship that should never be.
Noah gripped her arms as if he wanted to shake her. ‘Dammit, Cate, can’t you see this is no game? When this is all over we need to talk about the rest of our lives.’ He took a shaky breath. ‘I want you to come back to Sydney with me. We should be together.’
That completely floored her. After all she’d gone through with Brett, here she was, receiving another offer to be a Sydney doctor’s wife. Assuming Noah was talking marriage. How did she get herself into these situations? He’d expect her to leave everything she loved and held dear, desert her friends and colleagues at her hospital and play happy housewife to Noah in Sydney. After knowing him for less than a week! ‘I can’t’ was all she could manage, but a tiny part inside her was tired of fighting the strength of her feelings for Noah and urged her to listen.
‘That’s not the answer I wanted,’ he said as his arms dropped to his sides. Weak tears hovered behind Cate’s eyes. Confusion and indecision wasn’t like her and she hated the feeling. Disgusted with herself, Cate needed to get away. She turned on her heel, flung open the door and almost ran down the corridor.
She’d never run from anyone in her life and she hated the thought that Noah had seen her run from him.
Monday 12 March
After a restless night’s sleep, Cate woke to bright sunlight. Even Point Lookout had had barely three millilitres of rain. The highway was still cut off and would be for days, but the water was going down in the town centre. Emergency vehicles could even drive through some of the streets.
The schools were still closed and, as expected, Amber was unable to come in. Cate worked the morning shift and tried to vary her routine to avoid seeing Noah. She wanted to sort out her feelings, and she reminded herself how short the time was that they’d known each other. She didn’t need to rush. She didn’t go down to breakfast and spent more time on the wards than in her office.
Now that the rain had ceased and the upriver levels were falling, the SES had the chance to offer to ferry hospital staff across the river. This allowed those who had worked to have a break and new volunteers to take extra shifts. The rooms in the nurses’ home were vacated as staff moved more freely between home and work.
Wryly, Cate slipped a room key into an envelope and wrote Noah’s name on it. At least he might get a better night’s sleep in a proper bed.
All in all, the hospital appeared less of an outpost in the middle of a huge inland sea. The water covered the land in every direction and houses popped above the mirror-like surface like islands. Incredibly, morale was good.
Except in Cate’s office. She wanted to go home, where she couldn’t be rushed into something she wasn’t sure of. She’d come perilously close to falling in love with Noah Masters, a city-bred, budget-conscious despot who agreed with the downgrading of her hospital—and expected to dominate her personally. She couldn’t do it. So why did she still want to give him another chance?
The phone rang and Cate snatched it up with relief. It was Stella Moore. ‘Big problems, Cate.’ Cate switched modes as Stella went on. ‘I’ve got young Barry Kelso, Jim Kelso’s ten-year-old boy, with severe abdominal pain and a white cell count of twenty-six thousand. The resident thinks he’s about to rupture his appendix. He needs to go to Theatre pronto and they don’t think an airlift would get him to another hospital quick enough.’
Cate frowned. ‘But we’ve already got one theatre going and I don’t have more theatre staff on duty—or a surgeon, for that matter. So we’re better to fly him out.’
Stella wasn’t having it. ‘You can be the scrub nurse, and what about Masters? You told me he trained as a surgeon in Sydney. It’s not a big operation but if that appendix blows we’re going to have one sick kid. He needs attention now.’
Cate thought quickly and weighed up the chances of arranging a second theatre team. If Stella thought time was that critical then it was. ‘Get the resident to ring Dr Masters and I’ll see if I can find a scout nurse at least. Ring me back with his answer.’ She ran her finger down the list of staff on duty and located one of the nurses who usually worked in the theatres doing a shift in the medical ward. She called Stella back and confirmed that surgery would take place.
Cate looked at her watch. ‘Prep Barry and send him around to Theatre. I’ve sent a nurse inside to start a set-up in Theatre two and hopefully Dr Masters will have organised an anaesthetist.’ Cate grabbed her pager and pulled the office
door shut behind her. She was too tired for this. She hadn’t worked in Theatres for twelve months and she wasn’t looking forward to working with Noah.
But she needn’t have worried. Noah only spoke to her when absolutely necessary. He looked pale and tense and she felt a prick of concern and that niggly feeling again.
The resident was an able assistant, which made Cate’s job easier. But she hated the loss of rapport that she’d been used to with Noah.
As she handed the special appendix forceps to Noah they could all see how careful he would have to be. The bloated offender hovered on the brink of exploding as it was tied off and severed from its anchor. A chain reaction of sighs reverberated around the room when the inflamed tube of tissue lay harmlessly in the kidney dish.
Noah, internally at least, allowed himself to relax. It had been even harder than he’d imagined to force himself to operate. When he’d entered the room fully scrubbed, they’d all been waiting for him, and the fact that it had been two years since he’d picked up a scalpel had crashed in on him.
The ghost of Donna had seemed to hover in front of the table until the moment he’d seen Cate’s eyes above her mask and then, strangely, his wife had disappeared. But not the nerves.
His surgical skills had returned with gradually increasing ease and he remembered he’d always enjoyed Theatre work until that last time—but he’d still damned Cate for placing him in this position.
In fact, damn Cate for forcing him into a lot of things he hadn’t planned on, like falling in love with a woman who didn’t love him. And damn himself for being so irrational!
Now that the surgical danger was past he just wanted to get out of there. He couldn’t stand the bleakness he saw in Cate’s eyes above her mask. He’d only glanced at her once during the operation and that had been his only fumble.
Closure was fast and neat, and before Cate knew it Noah was leaving the theatres. He didn’t even look her way as he pushed open the door, and she was surprised how much that hurt.
There was a sudden lessening of tension in the room with his departure and the scout nurse cracked a joke, which the anaesthetist appreciated anyway. Cate just smiled tiredly.
Noah was an accomplished surgeon as well as an excellent diagnostician. And he didn’t want to use either skill. She wished she knew why. Still, they were all grateful he’d been there today. Cate tidied the theatres on autopilot. There was so much she didn’t know about Noah and some things she’d been wrong about. How far-fetched was the idea that they could make a life together?
When she left the theatres, she turned towards the gardens. She needed fresh air and a moment to gather herself. Apparently, so had Noah.
Cate hesitated, but then he looked up from the bench he was sitting on and stood up.
‘Have a seat for a moment, Cate. Please.’ The dappled sunlight cast shadows on his face and she thought he looked tired and, strangely, almost defeated.
She didn’t say anything, just perched on the end of the bench, and he sat down beside her. She waited for him to speak and the leaves rustled with the light breeze to fill the silence. He didn’t look at her when he asked the question so it took her by surprise.
‘Tell me about your engagement to Dwyer.’ It was the last thing she’d expected him to say.
Cate looked at the backs of her hands and her ringless fingers. There was no reason he shouldn’t know. ‘My engagement was a mistake. I entered into it for all the wrong reasons and thankfully Brett broke it off when I refused to go to Sydney with him.’ She turned her head towards Noah. ‘I thought what we had would be enough, along with a family, for me to be happy. But it wouldn’t have been.’
She met Noah’s eyes. ‘Was your marriage what you expected?’
He sighed. ‘My wife died two years ago. It was the worst day of my life.’ Cate winced at the pain in her heart that statement caused. Of course he’d loved his wife.
Noah went on in a curious flat tone that showed he preferred not to think about these memories. ‘The day started normally enough. We had another argument, another nail in the coffin of our two-year marriage. She wanted extensions to the house, and I felt like we’d just got rid of the last lot of builders living in the place.’ He grimaced wryly. ‘Stupid reasons to fight but our married life seemed to end up like that.’
He sighed. ‘We didn’t have enough in common and should never have drifted into that marriage. I regret we wasted so much of the time we should have enjoyed before she died.’
He rubbed the palms of his hands on his trousers. ‘That day I left for work with arguments unresolved, and I remember feeling as guilty as hell, but I still left. That was the last time I saw her alive.’ Cate lay her hand over his and he went on.
‘When I got to work, I buried myself in the chaos.’ He shook his head. ‘Work shouldn’t shield you from the responsibilities of your family. I had a responsibility to put my wife first.’ Cate could see he’d almost forgotten she was there.
‘Donna and our hassles were soon swallowed by the influx of emergencies. When the moment came it was like so many others that I didn’t even have a premonition. There were two motor vehicle accident victims—emergency tracheostomy for a child, followed by the resuscitation of a woman in her twenties. We worked on the child first and by the time we started on the woman she was almost dead. That’s when I found out it was Donna. She’d driven her car into another one and I have to believe her carelessness was because of the way I left her.’
‘You can’t know that.’ Cate closed her eyes briefly at the pain in his voice and she couldn’t help shifting closer to him to offer what comfort she could.
‘Donna died and I was the one who lost her.’
Cate opened her mouth to speak but he must have sensed her intention because his eyes implored her to let him finish.
‘It all happened so fast. Obviously, if there had been the resources and the time, I would have arranged for another doctor to take over her care, rather than be responsible myself. But there wasn’t time. We rushed her to Theatre and we tried frantically to stop the bleeding, but it wasn’t good enough.’ He shook his head and his voice was flat. ‘I wasn’t good enough. I still don’t know, if she’d been someone I hadn’t been emotionally involved with, whether I would have been able to save her, or if it had always been hopeless.’
He looked around at the garden and then back at Cate. ‘I’ve been living in a vacuum for the last two years. The guilt changed me. It wasn’t my fault or that of any of the staff on that day. It was the fault of inadequate funds for staffing at major hospitals. But I couldn’t allow myself to be placed in that situation again. Someone more influential than a director of casualty needed to address those issues. I decided I would see that it was done—for Donna and others like her.’
He shrugged. ‘For the next eighteen months I shut myself off from social contact and concentrated on the fight to ensure that adequate staffing and funding would be directed towards hospitals with greater workloads.’
He shrugged again. ‘In administration, I did make progress. When I was seconded to oversee the amalgamation of New South Wales regional hospitals, I felt I had a chance to ensure that funds were diverted to the areas that needed them most.’
He looked down at Cate and smiled at her. ‘My crowning conceit was the short time I assumed I would need to sort out these tiny outposts of inefficiency.’
Cate gave a wry chuckle and he raised his brows ruefully.
‘I knew it was only a temporary post, but if I managed to initiate the changes that my weak-kneed predecessors hadn’t been able to achieve, with those credentials behind me I could make a difference where it really counted. Somewhere it affected a major city so that what had happened to Donna and others would never happen again.’
He smiled down at her. ‘I thought I’d start with Riverbank. Thank God I did. I met this gorgeous, war-like creature who stood up for her hospital and showed me that Emergency facilities are needed everywhere—city and country.’<
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Cate closed her eyes as she felt a rush of understanding, and of relief. Then she ventured a comment. ‘Do you still feel you can’t practise medicine?’
‘Tenacious as always.’ Noah looked at her. ‘I’m not ruling it out.’ He stood up and he stared down at her as if imprinting her face on his memory. ‘That’s all I wanted to say, Cate. I hope now you can see why I’ve done what I’ve done, said what I’ve said, and that you don’t hate me too much.’ And then he left her.
She stared at the spot where he’d disappeared through the doors. Now what did she think?
She felt like she was on an out-of-control train rushing down a hill and she wasn’t sure if she wanted to strap herself in or jump off before it was too late. She needed time out.
She went to see Sylvia and played dolls for half an hour until Gladys came for a brief visit to her daughter.
Cate returned to her office and, of course, the phone was ringing. Lately, she’d almost felt like throwing the thing against the wall. It was definitely time to have a few days off.
It was Amber. After the pleasantries to which Cate lied and said she was fine, Amber dropped her bombshell. ‘Brett has offered to babysit Cindy so that I can work Tuesday.’
Cate’s eyes widened. ‘Do you think he’s in a fit state of mind to do that?’
Amber was serious. ‘He says it will keep him busy and he wants to.’
‘He’s always been good with kids,’ Cate agreed, and wondered what else was going on. But it was none of her business. Amber knew Brett’s failings and he did have good points. Cate just didn’t appreciate them and obviously Amber did. It would take some getting used to but the idea wasn’t crazy.
Amber rang off and Cate replaced the receiver. She could go home at the end of this shift. Tonight. If she could find someone with a boat to take her. Amber would work tomorrow’s shift.
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